Harvesting (still)

We're harvesting still. According to the Chia GUI I have 1,125 plots taking an estimated 111.36 TiB. I still have some disk space left on the storage server. Here are the current stats:

NAME    SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
pool1  72.8T  49.9T  22.8T        -         -     0%    68%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
pool2  29.1T  26.3T  2.82T        -         -     0%    90%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
pool3  72.8T  65.5T  7.25T        -         -     0%    90%  1.00x    ONLINE  -

I've filled Pool2 and Pool3 both to 90%. The remaining 10% is to allow ZFS to have some free space to function. I expect to fill Pool1 to the same level over time. I know I could run them as individual drives and if one fails simply replace it (losing whatever plots it may have had) but I hate losing data which is why I am running ZFS on the storage server.

I replaced the i3-8100 CPU and its motherboard with a Ryzen 5600X CPU and a newer motherboard. I was hoping to have more memory in the storage server for better caching as well as more CPU cores/threads. At the moment I have the 64GB from the i3 in there (4 x 16GB sticks) along with the SAS controller and 10GbE network card. I even swapped the M2 SSD from the i3 onto the new motherboard.

As I mentioned in my last post my options once I have filled the storage server are rather limited. I think a more ideal setup would be multiple storage servers, but I am not looking at doing that. Chia (XCH) is currently worth $63.35 USD as of today (17th of April 2022) so unless you are earning heaps of them its barely enough to cover the electricity bill.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

22nd of June

Image
Currently plotting away one plot at a time, using 4 threads (at least in phase 1). This is so as to not wear out the M.2 SSD so fast. I have a farmer or as Chia refers to it a "full node". I have a separate harvester machine (in a Meshify 2 case) that is basically a storage server. It has 6x WD Red 8TB drives at the moment with 60 plots taking around 5.9TiB. I have an M.2 to U.2 adapter on order, that I got on Amazon, but its not expected until next month. Must have sent it by sea.   I ordered one of these from one of my local PC shops in the hope it will turn up sooner. Its a PCIe card that you slot the U.2 drive onto it and then put the card into a PCIe x4 slot. Once this arrives I should be able to remove the M.2 SSD from the farmer and replace it with this and run multiple plots at a time. Its taking about 15 minutes to transfer a single plot from the farmer onto the harvester. I've setup a cron job to run every hour to pick up any completed plots from the local hard ...
Read more

More plotting

I'm still producing plots as I have free disk space. While that is ongoing I have rounded up all my old hard disks. I have repurposed one of my old machines and have it running Darricks Boot and Nuke (DBAN) to wipe the hard disks. I started with the 320GB drives and they're taking around 6 hours to wipe. They were made in 2007 and 2008. I'll be dropping these drives off at an ewaste (electronic waste) facility so they can be recycled. I'll be getting rid of all the 3.5" drives that are less than 4TB. I am still waiting on the drive brackets for the storage server. They were supposed to be in this week but have been delayed again. I saw the QNAP TL-R1200C-RP 12 bay 2U rack mount JBOD for sale. What is unusual about this is most rack mount JBOD's use SAS which means you need a HBA card with external SAS ports in your PC, but this one uses USB 3.2 to connect. The new network switch was supposed to be available "mid-August". The computer shop don't kn...
Read more

Storage server upgrade part 1

The first part of the upgrade was to the existing storage server. The existing server is in a Meshify 2 case and has 10 x 16TB HDD drives and a couple of SATA SSD's to use as log devices. The change was to bump the memory up to the maximum it supports (128GB). I tried around a year ago however the memory I got didn't work and the computer wouldn't even POST. This time using different memory modules it worked. While I was at it I disabled the log devices and removed the 2TB SATA SSD's. The log device is only used for writes. Seeing as the disks are full I don't write anything to the drives so there is no point in having a log device. I put a single 1TB SATA SSD in their place to use as a cache drive. I let the system run for a day so I could get some stats on how it was being used. It had a zero hit rate so I decided to disable it. On the subject of stats I seem to be getting around 75% hit rate on the memory cache (or ARC as its called under ZFS). A cache drive (or ...
Read more